Linux Journal December 2016

My Sysadmin Is a FOR/NEXT Loop

Technology always has promised to save us time by doing the things we can do more
accurately and with greater efficiency. It has proven to live up to the details,
but it completely missed the spirit of the concept. Rather than letting a Bash
script do 12 hours of data entry in 20 seconds and then eating ice cream for two
days, we've just crammed more work into the time that technology freed up. I
realize it was inevitable, but at times, I still feel that as a generation, we
were bamboozled. This month, we just give in to the inevitable and learn to do
more and more things thanks to the "help" of technology.

We start off the issue with Reuven M. Lerner, who teaches us that computers even
can replace
the need for humans to judge burrito quality. Your burrito-tasting skills are not
irreplaceable, and Reuven sadly proves it. Dave Taylor follows with a complex
look at determining the phase of the moon. In ancient times, it took giant stone
monuments and complicated stick alignment to determine the next lunar phase. Dave
shows how a few lines of admittedly complicated code can figure it out in
seconds. Thanks, Dave. I'll blame the next werewolf uprising on your script.

Kyle Rankin takes us a step beyond Puppet this month with a look at MCollective.
Automating the setup of servers is a real time-saver, but sometimes managing them
takes a bit more than configuration managers can handle. MCollective goes to the
next step, and "orchestrates" server administration tasks. You'll want to check
it out if you manage more than a couple servers.

Even if you manage only a couple
servers in your own home, however, you'll want to read my column this month on how
to create a PHP dashboard. I've covered PHP in my column before, but this
time, I add input to the scripting in order to provide feedback and
accomplish tasks. This article teaches how to do some powerful and dangerous things with
PHP, but in the right situation, that power can be very useful.

In a move reminiscent of Reese's adding peanut butter to chocolate, Todd A. Jacobs
shows how to take Docker and Puppet, and integrate them for even more
automation. During the past few years, we've learned just how powerful container
systems like Docker can be for spinning up single-purpose servers. Todd walks
through provisioning those containers with Puppet. It's fascinating to see tasks
that we used to do manually not only become automated, but also to evolve into
something that can be managed with programmatic commands instead of elbow grease.
If you want to take your automation to the next step, check out Todd's article.

And finally, Jan Newmarch continues his series on low power wireless, which sounds
like a step backward, but is really a huge advancement for near field
communication. There are so many wirelessly connected devices in my house, the
idea of efficient communication between them, using open standards, is
incredible. If you are remotely interested in the Internet of Things, you'll want
to read his series.

We also have tech tips, product announcements, kernel updates and all
the other things you expect in an issue of Linux Journal. Even though our
magazine is digital, we still get to read it with our human eyes. But who knows,
next month, we might have an article on a new AI that reads magazines for you and
implants the learned information directly into your brain. That thought both
excites and terrifies me!